The Luna They Forgot

Chapter 4: What the Reports Revealed

Marus delivered the border patrol reports three days later, hidden inside a basket of firewood he left at the servants' entrance, addressed to no one, meant for exactly one person.

I waited until Rowan was asleep and the house had settled into its late-night quiet before I unwrapped the papers at my writing desk, the same desk where the list of names had grown steadily over the past week — Henrik, Marus, Old Beatrix, and now three more Sentinels Marus had quietly reached out to, men and women who had spent five years waiting for a reason to remember what they used to be.

The reports were worse than I'd feared.

Kane wasn't simply considering ceding the northern territory. The paperwork Marus had copied showed a treaty already drafted, dated for signature in eleven days — the same week, I realized with a cold, creeping dread, as the pack's annual Founding Ceremony, when every Alpha family in the region gathered to renew old alliances and, occasionally, negotiate new ones.

Kane intended to hand my father's land to Thornewood in front of every pack leader who mattered, dressed up as diplomacy, sealed with the kind of public ceremony that would make it nearly impossible to reverse afterward without triggering a war nobody currently wanted.

And buried in the treaty's fine print, in language so carefully bureaucratic it was clearly designed to be skimmed past rather than read closely, was a clause granting Thornewood patrol rights to "search and reclaim any displaced persons or property" within the ceded territory.

*Displaced persons.* Not deer. Not timber. People. My people — the scattered Voss survivors Henrik had told me were still hiding in the northern villages, families who had spent five years believing distance from Kane's pack meant safety from Thornewood's memory.

Kane wasn't just giving away land. He was handing Thornewood a legal excuse to finish what they'd started five years ago, and he almost certainly had no idea he was doing it — which meant either Priya knew exactly what she was negotiating, or she was being used just as thoroughly as everyone else in this house had spent five years assuming I was.

I sat with that thought for a long time in the candlelight, turning it over the way my father used to turn over a difficult strategy problem, searching for the angle that made everything else make sense.

If Priya knew, then she wasn't simply a grieving widow who'd stumbled into a convenient marriage — she was something far more dangerous, a woman deliberately positioning herself to help erase the last of a bloodline she had every reason to want gone, for a widow's inheritance claim that would only strengthen once Voss claims to the northern territory disappeared for good.

If Priya didn't know, then she was a pawn being maneuvered by someone else entirely — possibly Thornewood itself, working through channels far more patient than a direct assault.

Either way, the eleven days before the Founding Ceremony had just become considerably more urgent than I'd initially planned for.

---

I found Old Beatrix the following afternoon, in the small eastern village Henrik had mentioned, her healer's cottage tucked between two larger homes as though it were trying to apologize for taking up space at all.

She recognized me before I'd said a single word — the same unnerving instinct, I suspected, that had made her valuable to my grandmother decades ago.

"You have your grandmother's hands," she said by way of greeting, studying my fingers the way a healer studies old scars. "Strong. Steady. She used to say a Voss woman's hands were the last thing anyone should underestimate about her."

"I need to ask you something about Priya," I said, foregoing pleasantries I didn't have time to spare. "Do you know anything about her, before she arrived at the pack house eighteen months ago?"

Beatrix's expression shifted, something careful and knowing settling into the lines around her eyes. "I wondered how long it would take someone to start asking that question properly," she said. "Come inside. This isn't a conversation for open doorways."

Her cottage smelled of dried herbs and old parchment, shelves lined with the careful accumulation of a woman who had spent her entire life keeping other people's secrets in service of keeping them alive.

"Priya isn't from Thornewood originally, if that's your concern," Beatrix said, settling into a worn chair across from me. "But her mother's pack merged with Thornewood's territory nearly a decade ago, after a border dispute of their own. Priya grew up under Thornewood's authority for the last several years of her adolescence, even if she wasn't born to their bloodline directly."

"That's not in any records I've seen at the pack house."

"It wouldn't be," Beatrix said. "She arrived as Kane's brother's widow, grieving and displaced, and no one thought to ask deeper questions of a grieving woman. Grief tends to make people generous with their trust in ways they might not otherwise be."

"You think she orchestrated her husband's death."

"I think," Beatrix said carefully, "that convenient timing has a way of accumulating around ambitious people, and I've learned not to dismiss coincidence as thoroughly as this pack seems inclined to. Kane's brother died in a border skirmish that, as I recall, occurred suspiciously close to Thornewood's patrol routes for an incident that was supposedly unrelated to them."

The pieces were arranging themselves into a shape I didn't like, but one that made a terrible kind of sense — Priya, positioned patiently inside Kane's household for eighteen months, gently steering pack policy toward exactly the outcome Thornewood needed, using grief and gentleness as the perfect cover for a plan five years or more in the making.

"I need proof," I said. "Something concrete enough to bring before the pack elders, not just suspicion and old coincidences."

"Proof is a dangerous thing to go looking for when the person you suspect has spent eighteen months making herself indispensable to your husband," Beatrix said gently. "Be careful, child. A cornered schemer is considerably more dangerous than a comfortable one."

"I've spent five years being careful," I said, rising to leave. "I'm not interested in spending an eleventh day the same way, not with the Founding Ceremony bearing down and my father's land about to be signed away in front of half the region's Alpha families."

Beatrix studied me for a long moment, something like approval finally settling into her expression. "Then I'll ask around the healer's circle," she said. "We hear things the pack elders never do. Grief tends to loosen tongues in ways formal meetings rarely manage."

I left her cottage as the sun began setting over the eastern village, eleven days suddenly feeling like considerably less time than it had that morning, the weight of everything I now knew pressing down harder than the sword I still kept hidden beneath the old nursery floorboards.

Somewhere back at the pack house, Priya was likely helping Rowan with his evening lessons, playing the devoted almost-mother in front of a household that had no idea what she might actually be building toward.

I intended to make certain that particular performance didn't survive the Founding Ceremony.